man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
Bruce Lee, in Work and Recreation and Wisdom and Ignorance
tiny.ag/k0emebpg · ★★☆☆ Fair (75 ratings) · submitted 2011 by peter
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
tiny.ag/q9h2hw7e · ★★☆☆ Fair (77 ratings) · submitted 2011 by peter
Some people say I'm afraid of conflicts. I disagree but don't dare contradict them.
tiny.ag/0csjlftm · ★★☆☆ Fair (70 ratings) · submitted 2011 by peter
Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.
tiny.ag/g3vhom0x · ★★☆☆ Fair (79 ratings) · submitted 2010 by peter
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!', but 'That's funny...'
Isaac Asimov, in Science and Religion and Success and Failure
Tiny links to aphorisms · posted Jun '20 by Peter Wastholm
Every aphorism now has a short link that looks something like this:
That last bit is just a short random sequence of numbers and letters that identifies a single aphorism. Not very memorable, perhaps, but at least short and share-friendly. Feel free to use them in social media, print them on T-shirts, tattoo them on your forearm, or whatever else you want.
Aphorisms Galore! Is 20 Years Old Today! · posted 2017 by Peter Wastholm
Aphorisms Galore! celebrates its first twenty years by launching a few improvements:
As an experiment, I will also add a cryptocurrency tip jar where users and visitors can throw me a virtual coin if they want to show appreciation for the site and encourage its continued development.
Finally, if you haven't had enough of my ramblings, you...
I respect you Mr Wastholm. · posted Jan '20 by The Paysagiste Nantais
Dear Mr Wastholm.
Your admiration for your blog inspires me.
I admire that you manually deleted every single spammy comment from, I am ashamed to say, people like me.
But we are not all like that Sir, oh no. I don't take your website for its high metrics, I think it's damn awesome than you have a now 23-year-old blog.
This website will one day be worth a fortune so keep at it.
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I learn from this Article · posted Feb '20 by Grandchamp Roofing
Thank you for this. Read it and learn something out of it.
Good Work! · posted Apr '20 by The Kent Scaffolder
First I'd like to say congratulations on 20 years! That in itself is something so special, you've been running this website since I was 9! Crazy stuff. Secondly, I'd like to mention how cool it is that you still look after your site! Many would have given into the spammers and got rid of the comment function but you solider on! Manually deleting each and every one of them. That takes some serious drive and dedication! Good on you. Also, it's super cool that you've removed google analytics from your site. Many people are completely unaware of how their data is harvested and used so big ups for that! I wish you the best of luck in the future Mr Wastholm and here's to another 20 years! Scaffolding Kent
Glendale Landscaping · posted May '20 by Glendale Landscaping
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Congrats! · posted Aug '20 by Gladys
Congratulations for reaching 20+ years. I've seen a lot of new updates and was thinking of doing the same with some of my websites. I know piwik is helpful in some way since I've tried that tool and I would also love to try encrypting the web traffic, same as what you mentioned in the post. Thank you for providing such information that becomes a suggestion on my end. Anyway, are you insterested in adding a fence around your property in Lakewood, CO? Find out why wrought iron fence can be the best choice.
Ideologies Considered Harmful · posted 2011 by Peter Wastholm
Beware the man of one book. -- St. Thomas Aquinas
Ideologies can be a great thing. They can provide us with consistent belief systems. They can help us make decisions in line with our moral convictions. In a way, they can simplify our lives.
Ideologies can be a terrible thing. They can cause us to get stuck in dogmatic thinking. They can make us blind to other perspectives than our own. They can encourage us to oppress those we disagree with, or even to go to war.
In 1931, an Austrian mathematician named Kurt Gödel proved that, in layman's terms (I am not a mathematician myself), any nontrivial logical system cannot be both consistent and complete -- in other words, it must either have a contradiction built into it somewhere, or there must exist cases that the system doesn't cover. Sure, he was talking about mathematics, but still: it's an interesting point to consider when encountering systems (such as ideologies) that claim to be both consistent (free of contradictions) and complete (applicable everywhere). Actually, I contend that all ideologies contain fundamental assumptions about the world that are dubious at best, or downright false at worst.
If you're reading this, chances are you are living in a country that largely subscribes to the ideology called capitalism (though some people think this term sounds scary somehow and choose to call their systems "market economies" or even "free markets" instead). As we know, capitalism posits that the state should stay away from commerce, and that it should be consumers' preferences that dictate what goods and services should get produced, and how much they should cost, the idea being that this should result in the most efficient use of resources. That's great, except it seems to assume that w...
Great Post · posted Dec '19 by Richard Sharp
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My First Thoughts... · posted Dec '19 by Erik
My first thoughts when reading your comment were going to be pretty harsh. I wasn't sure where you were going with you comments until you gave both sides. The capitalism and socialism examples are great to showcase your thoughts on the consideration we sometimes give to over-simplified ideologies. It makes sense that everything that tried to encompass massive amounts of people/things will have inherent flaws. On both sides. Clever explanation my friend. Also check out my therapy business if you're ever in California! <a href="https://erikandersontherapy.com">Erik Anderson Therapy</a>
Diamond Heating and Cooling · posted Jan '20 by Diamondheatingandcooling
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Fukushima Conspiracy Theories: Neat, Plausible, and Wrong · posted 2011 by Peter Wastholm
There's always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong. -- Henry Louis Mencken
I have relatives in Fukushima, Japan; their house is only 4 km (2.5 miles) from the now-infamous Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. I have therefore spent considerable time lately following the news via television, newspapers, and web sites, both Japanese and Western. It has occurred to me that people relying entirely on Western media must have gotten a very distorted image of this disaster, and a very skewed sense of its proportions.
There has been a massive focus on the nuclear accident, which, in the grand scheme of things, has had and will have much, much less dire consequences than the unbelievable devastation caused by the earthquake and the ensuing tsunami. There has also been a lot of talk of "coverups" on the part of the power plant's owners (Tepco) and even on the part of the Japanese government; sometimes, these speculations have bordered on outright conspiracy theories. (And I'm only talking about big mainstream media here; many outlets on the fringes of the media landscape have of course provided a diet of "journalism" firmly rooted in conspiracy-land.)
Conspiracy theories are appealing because they seem to provide simple explanations for complex problems: if I can't get ahead in my career, it's because I am being actively held back by this or that group of people; if the police haven't solved this or that murder, it's because they are secretly in cahoots with the perpetrator; if Tepco's reports on the power plant are incomplete and sometimes contradictory, it's because the company is engaged in a coverup. Complicating points -- like the immense difficulties involved in collecting data from a highly sophisticated piece of technology in which sensors have been drowned in seawater, blown to smithereens, and/or cut off from e...
It is a Conspiracy · posted Jan '20 by smdc
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The Illusion of Precision · posted 2011 by Peter Wastholm
There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics. -- Benjamin Disraeli
Many years ago, while I was in the employ of a large international consulting company, I once helped a colleague out with a document he was working on. This took maybe half an hour, but ended up causing at least four different people to spend a total of at least a couple of days' worth of work trying to satisfy the corporate hunger for precise numbers, thereby illustrating the irrationality of trying to measure things too exactly.
At this and, I'm sure, most other consulting companies, keeping track of time spent on various activities was considered very important, and weekly time cards were expected. So, at the end of our brief work session, I asked my colleague how I should report the time. He gave me an activity number and, come Friday, I submitted my time card (which wasn't actually a card but a file) and forgot about the whole thing. Well, until a few days later when someone from elsewhere in the company called me and asked me why I had reported time on a one-off activity that had been concluded months earlier.
To make a long story short, this resulted in a whole lot of back-and-forth between various organizational units in different parts of the company's sprawling bureaucracy. (At this point, I'd like to point out that this was largely a well-functioning company -- but, as far as I know, every organization in history above a certain size has had a sprawling bureaucracy. I'm sure the builders of the Great Pyramid had some hellish paperwork, uh, papyruswork, to contend with.)
Now, since I bring it up here, clearly I feel there is something to learn from this incident, and I have already hinted at it. In everyday life, most people understand that close enough is, well, close enough. We let the soup simmer "a while," we add "a pinch" of salt to it, we serve it with "a few" bread rolls. In everyday...
You Are Better at Getting Things Done than You Think · posted 2011 by Peter Wastholm
If you do what you've always done, you'll be what you've always been. -- Unknown
Some people seem to get so much work done. Alexandre Dumas wrote 277 novels, including classics like ''The Three Musketeers'' and ''The Count of Monte Cristo''. Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize twice, the physics prize in 1903 and the chemistry prize in 1911. Thomas Alva Edison held 1,093 patents. (But he didn't invent the light bulb. Not exactly, anyway. He did, however, make important improvements that made electrical lighting practical for home use.)
It's easy to feel like a hopeless couch potato compared to people like this. Or compared to prosperous businesspeople, popular artists, or victorious athletes. Even compared to that annoyingly successful neighbor or acquaintance or colleague. But I think there are two things that are easy to forget but important to keep in mind.
The first thing is that we, as external observers, can only see the things these supposedly hypereffective people did do, not the things they didn't do. Like us, they probably had an even longer laundry list of things they wanted to do, but never got around to. Or at least didn't consider important enough, compared with other to-do items, that they took the time to do them. From this we can learn that we shouldn't worry too much if our to-do lists keep getting longer instead of shorter. This isn't really a problem as long as we also learn that we have to prioritize. If we want to travel the world, maybe we can't also have a meteoric career. If we want to learn something really really well, maybe we have to settle for simply getting by with other things. If...
Why Is It Okay to Be Ugly, But Not Stupid? · posted 2010 by Peter Wastholm
Wisdom and beauty form a very rare combination. -- Petronius Arbiter
In Western society, we generally don't find it acceptable to criticize people for being ugly. Typically, the stated reason for this is that a person can't help the way he or she looks. At the same time, however, most people don't even flinch when someone complains about another person being stupid. This is interesting, since arguably both physical attractiveness and intellectual capacity (and their respective opposites) are largely innate qualities, dealt out at birth in some grand cosmic lottery. Fundamentally, a person can't help being stupid any more than he or she can help being ugly. Actually, even less.
Beauty may be highly subjective -- or "in the eye of the beholder," as the saying goes -- but, for a given culture and a given time period, certain physical traits will be generally accepted as attractive, and others as less so. There are even some physical qualities that are considered beautiful regardless of culture, like youthfulness and symmetry. Therefore, a person has a reasonable chance to assess his or her level of physical attractiveness, and thereby establish a "baseline" from which to improve (by, for example, gaining or losing weight, applying more or less makeup, or even subjecting to medical procedures). With intelligence, establishing such a baseline is much more difficult.
The reason for this is that intelligence is like a race in which all participants are running backwards: everyone can see how much further along they are than the ones behind them, but no one has a clear view of how many are ahead of them, or of how far they are from the finish line. It's entirely possible for every single runner in the race to believe that he or she is in the lead, or at least up there with the very best, and that he or she is considerably closer to the end than to the beginning. In fact, it...
Interesting Thought · posted Jan '20 by smdc
I've often thought about the objectiveness of personal beauty but rarely have I thought about the inner objectivity of stupidity. I feel stupidity shouldn't be used as a universal blanket. I could be "stupid" in automotive repair, but I could also be "smart" on costume construction. The mind and the body are subjective subjects.
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Poker Aphorisms · posted 2010 by Peter Wastholm
Here you used to be able to read a guest post by PokerListings.com. At their request, this post has been withdrawn, but you can still read plenty of other posts on various subjects at the <A HREF="/blog">Aphorisms Galore! Blog</A>. See you there.
Aphorisms Galore! Is Now on Twitter · posted 2009 by Peter Wastholm
Starting today, the Aphorism of the Day is also available as @aphorismsgalore on Twitter. Due to Twitter's 140-character message limit, the entire aphorism will not always fit, but each post will always contain a link to a page where you can see the whole aphorism, as well as discuss and rate it. Maybe I will add other kinds of Twitter messages, too; if you have any ideas or suggestions, do let me know.
As before, if you want to receive the Aphorism of the Day in your mailbox, create or update your user profile and pick the subscription option you want.
Aphorisms-Galore.info · posted 2009 by Peter Wastholm
For a period of time, there have been two sites called Aphorisms Galore!: this one, which has existed since 1997, and another, which was much more recent. Since there can't really be two sites using the same trademark, this other site no longer exists, and its domain name, Aphorisms-Galore.info, now points here. I have tried to make the transition as smooth as possible by setting URLs in the Aphorisms-Galore.info domain up to redirect to the most relevant page possible here at AphorismsGalore.com.
Mr. Vitaliy Fastov, who until now operated "the other Aphorisms Galore!" now has a new site called Land of Wisdom which is also worth a visit if you're looking for quotations on a broad range of subjects.
In other news, the subscription feature, which has been disabled for a long long time due to technical difficulties with my previous server, will be reactivated in a few days, so check your settings if you want an insightful aphorism delivered to your inbox for free every week or even every day.